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mattdube 's review for:
This is another one of those books I looked at to see if it might be the right text book for my students. I'd pretty much already decided on this book before I read it, and nothing here changes my mind-- it's pretty lucid, does a good enough job of breaking down the component parts of the theory, and offers at least a semblance of application for each section.
There are a couple things that I'd like, though: I wish that Barry were more on board with the idea of giving us some terminology that can be used by students-- I'm thinking especially of his section on Deconstruction/ Post-structuralism, where I think he mentions difference, but never supplement or aporia. Likewise, it felt like I could've used a couple more terms in the psychoanalysis section, or seen what terms he does use developed more fully. It's a question of how you teach, I suspect, but I like to give students terms, and memorizable definitions, even when they are necessarily incomplete, so that they have something they can use. Here, I think Barry's approach is to embed the theory in narrative, which I think has a lot to recommend it-- it certainly gives a context for what happened, and places things in order, of one kind of another, and that's good if you want to give a big picture. But big pictures are kind of hard to carry, and harder still to apply when you're looking at smaller things, like a particular short story, and you're remembering the history of cultural materialism, instead of what cm asks you to notice.
It's also a little odd how Barry does his application sections-- for maybe half the areas, he applies the theory to the Poe story at the end of the book, which is helpful, though the contrast between the various schools isn't really developed. In other chapters, Barry summarizes an essay by a prominent critic from the school on some text or other-- which again is really interesting, but feels enough like a totally different type of approach that it practically exemplifies what people mean when they talk about apples and oranges.
It's intriguing, too, that reader response criticism never really comes up here.
That said, I think this is still the best textbook of its type I've seen. But it's a text that will be more of a springboard to bringing in other materials than it is a complete "course in a box." It'll orient the class toward the subject nicely, but there's a lot more that's needed to really make good use of the techniques this describes.
There are a couple things that I'd like, though: I wish that Barry were more on board with the idea of giving us some terminology that can be used by students-- I'm thinking especially of his section on Deconstruction/ Post-structuralism, where I think he mentions difference, but never supplement or aporia. Likewise, it felt like I could've used a couple more terms in the psychoanalysis section, or seen what terms he does use developed more fully. It's a question of how you teach, I suspect, but I like to give students terms, and memorizable definitions, even when they are necessarily incomplete, so that they have something they can use. Here, I think Barry's approach is to embed the theory in narrative, which I think has a lot to recommend it-- it certainly gives a context for what happened, and places things in order, of one kind of another, and that's good if you want to give a big picture. But big pictures are kind of hard to carry, and harder still to apply when you're looking at smaller things, like a particular short story, and you're remembering the history of cultural materialism, instead of what cm asks you to notice.
It's also a little odd how Barry does his application sections-- for maybe half the areas, he applies the theory to the Poe story at the end of the book, which is helpful, though the contrast between the various schools isn't really developed. In other chapters, Barry summarizes an essay by a prominent critic from the school on some text or other-- which again is really interesting, but feels enough like a totally different type of approach that it practically exemplifies what people mean when they talk about apples and oranges.
It's intriguing, too, that reader response criticism never really comes up here.
That said, I think this is still the best textbook of its type I've seen. But it's a text that will be more of a springboard to bringing in other materials than it is a complete "course in a box." It'll orient the class toward the subject nicely, but there's a lot more that's needed to really make good use of the techniques this describes.